This tiny island nation in the western Pacific Ocean is home to just 21,000 people, where – according to the UN – a quarter of adults use cannabis.

Not only are Palauans ahead of everyone else on this measure, they’re ahead by a long way. The country with the next highest rate of cannabis use is Italy, where – the report says – some 15% of adults use the drug.

But while Palauans seem to drink a lot of beer, they don’t drink much of anything else.

If one looks at the total amount of alcohol consumed – rather than just beer – Palau slips down to 42nd place out of 188. On that measure, the Czech Republic has the dubious honour of occupying the top spot.

The UN’s 2012 figures on cannabis use in Palau are more problematic than the WHO’s data on beer drinking.

The report’s authors could not obtain survey data for adults in Palau. So they used a survey of cannabis use among state high school pupils and extrapolated those results to estimate a figure for the whole adult population.

There is one state high school in Palau, with a student population of 742. The surveyors found that about 60% of the 565 respondents in that school had used cannabis at least once and almost 40% said they had used cannabis in the last month.

Not so much a high school, then, as a really high school. For comparison, a similar survey of schoolchildren carried out in the US found 23% of students say they used cannabis in the last month.

Emery Wenty, a director for the Ministry of Education in Palau, simply does not believe the UN’s figures.

“Palau is a very small island. If cannabis use is as prevalent as the UN claims,” he says, “you would see it and smell it everywhere. You don’t.

“You sort of know just about everybody. It’s inconceivable that a quarter of the population uses cannabis.”

Angela Me, a UN statistician who works on the World Drugs Report, accepts some of Mr Wenty’s criticisms.

There is a particular problem, she says, with collecting data from very small populations, because a small number of people changing their behaviour can create large swings in the statistics.
»Read full story